Asendia AI, an agentic recruitment platform founded by Tunisian founders Rihab Lajmi and Badis Zormati, has been admitted to Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch. The pair say they’re the first Tunisian founders to join YC, with Lajmi the first Tunisian woman to be accepted into the programme.
Asendia builds voice AI agents that conduct live phone interviews, screen and score candidates around the clock, and feed structured data back into staffing agencies' applicant tracking systems. The company says its clients recruit up to ten times faster than through traditional methods, with screening costs reduced by 90%. The platform is already live with agencies across the US and Europe, running thousands of automated screens in healthcare, IT and blue-collar verticals, and has roughly ten paying clients.
Both founders grew up in Tunisia before leaving at 18 to study and work in Germany. Lajmi studied engineering and spent several years at Microsoft in Munich before joining Google as a cloud engineer. Zormati studied electrical engineering at TU Munich and spent six years at Infineon, the German semiconductor company, working on AI systems. They eventually moved to San Francisco, raised an initial round from European investors and launched Asendia in late 2024.
Lajmi's path to Big Tech was not straightforward. In a LinkedIn post last year she described leaving Tunisia alone at 18, working to support herself financially through university in Germany, and applying repeatedly to Microsoft and Google for internships before being rejected each time. She finally secured a Microsoft internship at 22, converted it into a full-time offer at 24, joined Google in a larger role at 26 and left at 27 to start Asendia. "I saw the technology transform entire industries at a dizzying pace," she told Managers, the Tunisian business publication. "But recruitment had barely moved. Recruiters were still spending hours sorting CVs by hand, running repetitive interviews, juggling fragmented tools that didn't talk to each other."
The $600 billion global staffing industry remains one of the least digitised corners of enterprise software, with AI penetration estimated at under 1%. Asendia's closest comparisons are legacy platforms that have added AI features on top of existing architectures, including Bullhorn (valued at over $4 billion), HireVue (over $100 million in revenue) and Veritone (acquired for $170 million). Asendia is positioning itself as AI-native from launch.
YC's MENA alumni include the likes of Egypt's Breadfast, Thndr and Luciq (formerly Instabug), Morocco's Chari, UAE’s Ziina and Alaan, Algeria's Yassir and Iraq's Lezzoo, among others, but Tunisian founders have been notably absent until now.
